418 ANNUAL REPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 2 8 



Pleistocene period. We may confidently presume that this individual was 

 representative of the people who inhabited England at this remote date. 

 The sliuU, although deeply mineralized and thick-walled, might well have been 

 the rude forerunner of a modem skull, but the lower jaw was so apelike that 

 some experts denied that it went with the human fossil skull at all, and 

 supposed it to be the lower jaw of some extinct kind of chimpanzee. This 

 mistake would never have been made if those concerned had studied the 

 comparative anatomy of anthropoid ai)es. Such a study would have prepared 

 them to meet with the discordances of evolution. The same irregularity in 

 the progression of parts is evident in the anatomy of Pithecanthropus, the 

 oldest and most primitive form of humanity so far discovered. The thigh 

 bone might easily be that of modern man, the skull cap that of an ape, but the 

 brain within that cap, as we now know, had passed well beyond an anthropoid 

 status. If merely a lower jaw had been found at Piltdown, an ancient 

 Englishman would have been wrongly labeled " Higher anthropoid ape " ; if 

 only the thigh bone of Pithecanthropus had come to light in Java, then an 

 ancient Javanese, almost deserving the title of anthropoid, would have passed 

 muster as a man (p. 204). ... In a brief hour I have attempted to 

 answer a question of momentous importance to all of us — What is man's 

 origin? Was Darwin right when he said that man, under the action of biologi- 

 cal forces which can be observed and measured, has been raised from a place 

 amongst anthropoid apes to that which he now occupies? The answer is yes! 

 and in returning this verdict I speak but as foreman of the jury — a jury which 

 has been empanele<l from men who have devoted a lifetime to weighing the 

 evidence. To the best of my ability I have avoided, in laying before you the 

 evidence on which our verdict was found, the role of special pleader, being 

 content to follow Darwin's own example — Let the truth speak for itself (pp. 

 207-208). 



No less convinced of our positive knowledge is Prof. Henry F. 

 Osborn. His opinion, however, differs from the one expressed by 

 Sir Arthur Keith in a very important detail. According to Keith 

 and many other students, the line of human ancestry goes back to 

 creatures which would be recognized, if found, as members of the 

 same family as the living gorilla and chimpanzee. According to 

 Osborn such is not the case. He has clearly stated his views in a 

 paper entitled " Dawn-Man Appears as Our First Ancestor," pub- 

 lished in the New York Times, Sunday, January 9, 1927, section 

 XX, page 3. 



I assign the Trinil man of Java, through my collateral researches, as of 

 the very dawn of the Age of Man, or Quaternary. Thus on the very threshold 

 of the Age of Man stand the two greatest achievements of prehistoric dis- 

 covery, — namely, the Trinil man of Java and the Piltdown man of Sussex, 

 England. The latter, aptly termed Eoanthropus (signifying "dawn man") 

 by Dr. Arthur Smith Woodward, F. R. S., has a brain so distinctively human 

 that the best anatomical authority places it very close indeed to the lower types 

 of the existing human brain. The degree of brain-i>ower intelligence of the 

 Trinil man is therefore of the utmost concern : Is his brain power of the 

 same kind, perhaps a little better, than that of an ai>e, a chimpanzee, or a 

 gorilla, or is it far superior to that of an ape and .'Similar to that of a lowly 

 order of man? We have recently found the answer. . . . Dr. Frederick 

 Tilney has been studying the psychology of the Trinil man through the evi- 



